Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,58

she hung up on him, sick as it made her feel. It was only five days since she had gotten back from Dallas, and although her sister was home again and had taken a leave of absence from work, Elise continued to feel off-kilter and anxious, and You Knew Me When was no longer as much of a joy as it had been before. She had had trouble sleeping since Belle’s hospitalization, and Will’s e-mail hadn’t helped. And now this phone call where he had put her on the spot, and to her alarm, she had felt a strange elation when he’d said, “I think you might want to be with me instead.” But why did she? He had no job and no clear idea of what he wanted to do professionally, and he also seemed to resent his father’s success, just as her sister and mother resented hers. Her life had been going along fine without him. She was in a relationship with a man she desired and respected; she was acting in good films and making a lot of money. Bourbon was going to premier at Cannes, and she would get to go there with Renn and it would be her first visit to the south of France and everything would be perfect if she could learn to focus on what was good for her rather than trying to sabotage her life by letting in the chaos she seemed lately to be so attracted to.

Will’s number was in her phone now, and his e-mail was on her computer. He was offering her something that she knew she shouldn’t want because it could not compete with what she already had. But he was competing anyway, and she had to admire his bravado, taking on a man like his father who did not, as far as she could tell, ever lose.

Chapter 7

Notes For This Isn’t Gold

A MEMOIR BY MELINDA BYERS

EARLY ON

He told me when we met that he had been fat as a child, and it wasn’t until he turned sixteen that he lost the extra thirty pounds he’d been carrying around since age eleven. I wasn’t sure if I should believe him because at the time I was working as a caterer, and I thought he might be making up this story in order to persuade me to bring him low-fat snacks that weren’t on the menu the studio had decided on. It turned out that he wasn’t lying, because eventually I saw the pictures that proved he really had been a fat kid. He looked so different in these photos from his current healthy and handsome self that his transformation seemed almost miraculous. “What finally made you lose the weight?” I asked.

“My brother’s girlfriend,” he said.

“Was she an aerobics instructor or something?”

His smile was sly. “No, I had a crush on her and wanted to steal her from him.”

I think I laughed, but I can’t remember for sure. I do know that I was a little taken aback. “Did you?”

“No, but I certainly tried.”

He loved to eat, still does, I’m sure, and I know how to cook, so it was, for a little while, a match made in the kitchen, if not in heaven. That day in July when he appeared at the table where I was setting out fruit cups and brownies, he was the sexiest man I had ever met. He was thirty-eight and I was twenty-nine, recently separated from a husband who was very earnest about ruining his life by shooting up whenever he could get the drugs his body had become dependent on, which was every day by the time I left him. If you had told me when Toby and I separated that my next husband would be a movie star, I would have laughed in your face. Even though I catered movie sets all the time, the only guys who talked to me were the crew and a few of the actors with bit parts, probably because they assumed I’d be an easy lay, which wasn’t true because (a) I was married, and (b) I’m not a slut. But I was, I guess you could say, kind of a babe. I had big breasts (real) and long legs and thick black hair that has since gone gray and now I have to dye it. I still have the boobs and the legs though. Renn was a fan of all three. He was also, for a while, the ideal man, a wild dream